Beyond Biopolitics. A Biopedagogical Perspective on Corporeal Experience

In this article, I am concerned with the position and role of the human body in the realm of education—more precisely, in relation to the issues of social emancipation and equality. As a rule, educational research has not paid much attention to the body, typically dealing with corporeality in a merely instrumental way. In recent times, the body has more and more become the focus of educational research. This is because these new approaches claim that the body plays a constitutive role in all educational processes. Nevertheless, I argue that the body is actually not taken seriously and that corporeality is still regarded as a nuisance or merely a tool. In this article, I will therefore try to conceive an alternative approach, which I call biopedagogic. I take some ideas from the biopolitical school of thought and confront these with concrete phenomenological analyses of occurrences and practices that take place in educational contexts and bring into presence the body in a literally physical sense (such as laughter, exhaustion, and repetitive exercises). This allows me to move a step beyond the biopolitical point of view, and to conceive of a perspective that considers the body to have, in and of itself, educational relevance. This is because certain corporeal experiences (as distinct from experiences of the body) might enable a deep transformation of individual and collective existence.